South African Businesses: There’s An App For That
The global market for smartphones is growing at 38.8% year-on-year according to the IDC, and the proliferation of apps for consumers is total. With many of these consumers being business people, business owners and managers, businesses are following the same rationale. ABI Research estimates that the value of the mobile app market reached $27 billion by the end of 2013, and the firm has predicted the number of large enterprises adopting enterprise app stores will grow at double-digit rates through 2018.
1. Enterprise Apps
Allow businesses to move from capital expenditure to operating expenditure in their budgets and forgo the normal high administrative costs of internal IT teams. This is replaced with outsourced specialist providers of a world class product or cross department small and large business application.
2. Custom Software
Traditional enterprise software has always been the domain of fee based consultants pushing hugely complicated solutions. Web based SaaS apps, even customised versions offers flexibility and powerful tools through API’s and integrations.
3. Bring Your Own Device
Gartner projects that by 2018, 70% of employees will conduct their work on smart devices.
What’s more, a U.K. study shows that over a third of workers would think about leaving their companies if they were not allowed to use a mobile device for work.
Increased access to broadband has helped market penetration in SA, as well as increased visibility of data packages offered by ISP’s along with the smartphone boom has helped South Africa skip ahead in cloud applications. This is most notable by the launch and continued growth in SA of Sage’s hosted cloud applications such as My Business Online and VipPayroll. As one of the biggest providers of software to small businesses, this will drive the adoption on other use-case specific, or industry applications across the SME sector.
The largest markets for these apps are in ERP, Document Management, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) , Field Management Applications as well as Hosted Email, Disaster Recovery and Collaboration Tools.
SovTech is a provider of Software-as-a-Service products and services to the South and East African small, medium and large business and organisational markets.